The $300 Gaming PC Build

The Athlon 200GE. Unlike older Athlons, this is taking advantage of the newer Ryzen architecture. So inside we have two Zen cores, which are clocked at 3.2 gigahertz. They do support hyper threading. As well as important though, we also have AMD Vega graphics built in. Mind you, its Vega three so it’s about the smallest version of Vega you can get but this is a big step up over those earlier Athlon’s and actually should give us enough performance for gaming.

I hope so. It’s a $55 processor so… Backing it up, we have eight gigabytes of Corsair Vengeance LPX RAM. Now what’s important about this is that any time you’re using something with integrated graphics such as the Athlon 200GE you want to give it as much memory bandwidth as possible, which is why we’re going with dual channel memory. And while eight gigs isn’t a ton, especially for such a cheap system that’s less than $300, it should be just fine.

Everything is going inside the Gigabyte A320M-S2H. Now this is a very cheap motherboard but importantly, because we are based on the newer Ryzen chipset, we actually have a lot of the higher end features. So not only will this support our Athlon processor but you could go all the way up to something like a Ryzen 72700X if you ever wanted to upgrade, although that might be a slightly ambitious upgrade but we do have support for DDR4 and importantly an M.2 SSD. That’s important because we’re using a 128 gigabyte 88 into SSD. Now first of all an SSD is always faster than a standard mechanical hard drive.

One of the nice things about budget builds is that this is actually cheaper than a full hard drive. And with only 128 gigs of capacity, it’s not going to be great but definitely should be enough to install a few games and get us up and running. Again, this computer’s all about getting us ready to go right now with plenty of upgrade potential later. Like buying a hard drive, or more memory, or a graphics card, or a better processor. All these things are possible at some point.

But not today. When you build a budget computer, there are a lot of ways you can cut corners and save a little bit of money. One area you shouldn’t cut corners on is with the power supply. So this is a 450 watt Casinoslots Singapore 80 plus bronze unit.

Now the 80 plus is important. Yes you could save probably like 15, 20 bucks by getting a cheap Diablo tech power supply. And it would work for like 15 minutes if you building a backpack PC but for something that’s actually going to last you a few years, and importantly give you a little bit of upgrade capacity in the future, going with something that’s a little bit high quality is definitely worth the few extra dollars that it costs. So what I liked about this case case is, like I was saying, it actually has some features, which is not always a given when you spend a very very small amount of money on a case.

So with this guy we do get an 80 millimeter exhaust fan. And it also has a full USB 3.0 port. A single one but you know, USB three is nice on a very very cheap case.

Look at this. We even have a little dust filter on the bottom, which is actually not super important because the power supply is on the top but OK I’ll take that. I like just how ridiculously light weight this case is. So we do have our USB 3.0 port on the side.

You also do have a pair of USB twos on the front. And once we get the motherboard in, we’ll have a few more around the back. I’m guessing that would open up our optical drive if we had one but in true cheap PC fashion, instead of an optical drive, that’s where we’re gonna stuff all our extra cables that we don’t need. So I’ve actually built a system in this case before, and it is a little bit tight but it’s not too bad. One of the nice things is that it is a full micro ATX case.

Which means you’re going to save a little bit of room on your desk or underneath your desk or where ever you wanna put it. The main issue here is that there’s basically no room around back for cable management but for a system like this especially concerning how basic it is, I think we’ll be just fine. Now I’m not doing a full PC build tutorial in this video.

If you guys wanna check that out we do one every year and I’ll link in the description as well as on a card. But the system itself actually should be pretty easy to put together. One of the nice things about this is because it is so cheap there are very few components. It’s not really that difficult to work inside the case. Basically what I’m saying is that if this is the very first time you’ve ever built a computer it is hard to go wrong with something like this. It as about as simple as it gets.

I’m actually kind of excited to see just how well this performs. So we did take a look at the Ryzen three and the Ryzen five chips with integrated graphics a little bit earlier this year and they were impressive but they’re also like, double the price of this. Mind you, this is like, half the CPU cores and less than half the GPU but considering we can build this entire system for less than $300, I really just wanna see, how good is it really? Also wow that is some incredibly well applied thermal paste. You see that?

Look how perfect it is. I feel bad about ruining it. Squash. Because RAM is so expensive these days, the eight gigs of RAM is actually the most expensive part of this build. Now you could get away with four.

Especially if you’re not really trying to do all that much gaming, you’d be just fine. But considering that I actually wanna have enough RAM to you know, open up a couple tabs in Chrome and also play a game of Fortnite. I feel like eight gigs is a worthy investment. And the nice thing about this board is that even though it’s not really super simple to upgrade, since you only have two dim slots, you could, in theory, bump this up to 16 gigs later once RAM prices eventually, you know, come back down to earth. So if we screw our SSD into place, we’re actually almost done. This is a very simple build.

All that’s left now is to put the motherboard inside the case, get everything wired up, and we can actually see how well our awesome $300 system performs. Or how not awesome it performs. A little bit of cable management, installing Windows, and a couple of software updates later, let’s see how the actual system performs. The spiritual successor to Boson.

So to start out with we have the good old classic Cinebench. Now this is not an incredibly powerful system, with only a dual core Ryzen based CPU, as well as those Vega three graphics, but, well I have to benchmark things cause that’s what I do. And not too bad, so we’ve got 122 in single core and 355 on the multi core. Now the only issue with these Athlon chips, I mean I guess there’s a couple, is there is really no over clocking capability, unlike the Ryzen chips. But because this is a full desktop processor, we look like we’re pretty much running at 3.2 gigahertz across the board.

1322, so definitely not setting the world on fire. But again this is better than the equivalent Intel integrated graphics. Getting into a real game we have CS:GO.

Now on medium settings at 1080p we’ve got somewhere between 50 to 60 fps. If we wanna go a little bit higher, we turn the settings down. But this is pretty playable. Just stay still. Stay still, I’ll get you. Damn, alright.

Wow we all died together. So Fortnite does run. It’s at 720p medium settings but we do get a pretty respectable 35 frames per second. I would love to show you Overwatch but for some reason when I actually try to open the game, even though it’s running here, it just turns off the monitor. Like legitimately just turns the whole thing off.

I can Alt tab back in and Windows pops right up. Nothing is crashing just the monitor doesn’t like Overwatch. Yeah there we go. Hamster (mumbles) wins again. So Overwatch is actually kinda playable. Now mind you we are running it on low settings and its at 75% scale at 1080p, which is I think roughly 1600 by 900-ish if my math is right.

But yes, totally playable. We’re getting about 40 frames per second or so. Next up we have Call of Duty Black Ops 4. A game which should not be able to run on this system.